OF POLICIES, POLITICS AND THE REAL WORLD

JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA argues that more than one truth can co-exist in the real world

These are not the best of times for Nigerians. I saw a post from a Nigerian skit maker where the said content creator was sending a message to former President Muhammadu Buhari’s social media account, that they miss Buhari. I thought that was interesting, especially when you consider that things got to such a point in the then president’s social media presence that the Nigerian government had to ban Twitter for several months. Today, missing Buhari is not considered out of order.

After a couple of years into President Buhari’s tenure, some people claimed they were missing his successor, President Goodluck Jonathan. It did not matter much that most voters had sent him packing out of Aso Rock when they had the chance to renew his mandate. There are those that swear that the only thing that came between then President Umaru Yar’Adua turning Nigeria into a developed country was death. As Nigeria’s challenges compound from one president to another, every president can rest assured that whatever happens during their tenure, their successor will be on hand to shift perception in their favour.

It does not take much to see why. If the country continues to do what it is used to doing, its problems can only compound. In that sense, all you need to do is maintain the status quo, hand-over and you will always appear better than your successor. Status quo here primarily means doing it business as usual; subsidies for instance, even if you must borrow to keep it going.

To buck that trend is to take political risks that could prove costly. Especially in a country where those who ought to lead the policy direction are quick to abandon their own ideas as soon as the first signs of its effects start to bite.  

The easiest job in the world is the work of being paid to engage and criticise government and its policies and programmes. If you learn from those that play the game well, you will never go wrong. If the government advances policy A, you can have a go at them, suggesting that they ought to do B because B worked in some country. If they then do B and it doesn’t immediately work, you can then say they didn’t do B the right way. Or on time. Or that it is not even really B. Because they did not execute it in the way you suggested they ought to. You can always use your reference country again. Context be damned.

If they do B and it works, you can take credit for it. Unlike the people who must design, apply, evaluate and reassess the policies, those whose job is to pick, point and criticise from afar will always appear to be better than those doing the job. Until they are then given the power and the office. Then, they start telling those who replaced them on the outside that, “you don’t have the full picture”. “Things are different inside”.

Everyone is playing their own game. You are either being played, or you are a player. You just must pray there are those with genuine public interest at heart. Short of that, it is a popularity contest of sort.

It also does appear like a contest of egos. Like how the same people who made endless arguments for the removal of FX arbitrage and fuel subsidies suddenly are angry about both policies. They said that both policies engender an uncompetitive system that allows for corruption to thrive. Now, they think both policies are bad. People advise you to jump, then they are shocked that you fell after making the jump. Let’s blame gravity.

They were right. That is, about those subsidies engendering an uncompetitive system. The argument still applies. A recent United States Department of Justice criminal indictment of a Nigerian businessman comes to mind. Fuel subsidy scam and FX arbitrage scam are two of the biggest scams that were perpetrated at scale, solely advanced by government policy in Nigeria. There is no system where both exist without their correlational and causative criminal activities. You cannot suggest that citizens are free to walk naked yet hope that sexual perversion will not be on the rise. One is a gateway to the other.

When opportunity meets motivation, what’s left is capability. Trusting that people will just behave themselves, having served them free drugs and alcohol is delusional at best, wicked in a sense. If you ask corrupt bankers which they prefer of the two policy-backed scams though, they’d choose the FX scam. Because for every dollar a politician or “businessman” profited from, these bankers knew to take their cut. They generally make money from every scaled scam, but this one was the easiest of the lot. It was bazaar without noise.

The other thing about both scams is that, sometimes, the line between it being a scam and a legalised irregularity can be so thin, it becomes hard to tell the pig from man and man from pig at times — if you remember Animal Farm. But at no time in this entire chain of criminality do people not know what they were doing. Everyone knew it was an illegal party and they also were aware it was going to end at some point. Because all parties, freak-offs or holy, eventually end. Ask Diddy.

When people suggest policies, often, they never accommodate the possibility of unintended consequences. When those policies are instituted and then appear to not immediately deliver their expected results, the same people who went touring morning TV shows to advance the same policy will swear that they wanted something different, or “something a lot more robust”.

Why do people find it difficult to say, “whilst things appear bad now, the policy is in the right direction. This is what we have always advocated for. That said, we are yet to see government officials themselves get to work on reducing their own allowances and other privileges”. It is a real world. More than one truth can co-exist.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing